Stranglehold [X360]

Inspector Tequila is one pissed off, um, inspector.

Surrounded by four thugs in the Chicago Historical Museum, Tequila sprints up the spine of a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton, dives through the air and takes one enemy out with a headshot. Landing on the upstairs balcony, he blasts a skeleton of a pterodactyl hanging from the ceiling. He jumps and grabs the swinging fossil with one hand, shoots another thug in the chest on his right, plugs one in the chest on the left. Tequila swings off the skeleton back to the balcony, takes careful aim at a thug across the room and fires one bullet. The bullet rips through the thug's throat, sending a shower of blood into the air.

His enemies fallen, Tequila does the one thing he has left to do. He picks up a health pack.

OK, so Stranglehold is still very much a videogame, but this shoot-em-up is getting as close to an interactive Hong Kong action movie as we've ever seen. In our latest hands-on session with Midway's upcoming title, set to hit the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC this summer, we had a blast blasting hundreds of bad guys in the museum, tearing apart everything in sight with the Massive D destruction system, a system so cool that the team behind Midway's Blacksite: Area 51 is borrowing it.

In the continuing story of John Woo's Hong Kong action classic "Hardboiled," Chow Yun-Fat reprises his role as Tequila, complete with an amazing virtual recreation of the actor and several hours of dialog from the recording booth. Our personal favorite is, "I'm talking to a dead man. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha."

Stranglehold has come a long way since we last saw it at E3 in 2006, adding two new Tequila Bombs and tons of new animations. As you take out thugs in creative ways (see T-Rex skeleton above), you fill up a meter that unlocks three Tequila Bombs. The first is Precision Aim. As time slows, your vision zooms in on an enemy, and you can target any point on an enemy for a one-shot kill with a number of different reactions. You can go for the throat (see shower of blood, above), the eye, the shoulder, the chest and everyone's personal favorite, the testicles.

The next Tequila Bomb is Barrage, allowing you to blast through tons of enemies with a flurry of bullets. In a cinematic, we saw Chow Yun-Fat grit his teeth and load his shotgun with six shells as bullets whizzed by his head. Then he ran at each enemy in the room and blasted them apart.